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Bone Dance: New and Selected Poems, 1965-1993 (Volume 27)
A prolific voice in Native American writing for more than twenty years, Rose has been widely anthologized, and is the author of eight volumes of poetry. Bone Dance is a major anthology of her work, comprising selections from her previous collections along with new poems. The 56 selections move from observation of the earth to a search for one's place and identity on it. In an introduction written for this anthology, Rose comments on the place each past collection had in her development as a poet.
"Rich in poems which enhance our awareness of the human complexity of our social and moral dilemmas." — Book Review Digest
"There is a whisper in the wind among the chapters . . . and a singing rain beyond the window." — American Indian Culture Research Journal
"Rich in poems which enhance our awareness of the human complexity of our social and moral dilemmas." — Book Review Digest
"There is a whisper in the wind among the chapters . . . and a singing rain beyond the window." — American Indian Culture Research Journal
135 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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July 4, 2022
There will be
No archeology
To my bones
My cells will
Not forget
How to live
How to be born
How to be still singing
When they feel
The new knowledge
Death is
Like dying
Each moment
Learning to live
Wendy Rose is of Hopi, Miwok and European descent, and is an artist, writer, and anthropologist and was nominated for a Pulitzer for her 1980 book Lost Copper. She writes that since her mother wasn’t Hopi, only her father, she was raised without a lot of culture, and she has had to grapple with that disconnect. Her poetry is spare, sublime, heart wrenching and covers all the wars, internal, external, international, in families. She should be required reading, and it is unfathomable she is not.
FOR MY PEOPLE
I was myself blow
Two leafs apart
Seeing the ground swim within
Sliding and slipping together
And apart
Growing closer
Biting at our shadows
Loving on our feet
Dying in our souls
Losing one another
Losing ourselves
Finding
THE LONG ROOT
The feeling of sand in my eye
Has somehow shortened my breath
Allowed the night to descend
In its slow and twisting stream.
Voices disguise themselves,
Plane smooth from me splinters
As I speak my bones on the mesa
So that part of me still believes
I will not be left here to die.
Before the intensity of summer
Is that devastating storm
And no matter how i try
There is no way to shake
Cambodia from my Wounded Knee.
LAB GENESIS
There will be
No archeology
To my bones
My cells will
Not forget
How to live
How to be born
How to be still singing
When they feel
The new knowledge
Death is
Like dying
Each moment
Learning to live
Each moment
In & out
Like bird breath
Like toad’s tongue
Like making love
When i die
I ask only
To be thrown
Into the sun
TO SOME FEW HOPI ANCESTORS
No longer the drifting
And falling of wind,
Your songs have changes;
They have become
Thin willow whispers
That take us by the ankle
And tangle us up
With red mesa stone,
That keep us turned
to the round sky.
You have engraved yourself
With holy signs, encased yourself
In pumice, hammered on my bones
Till you couldn’t longer hear
The howl of the missions.
THE MAN WHO DREAMED HE WAS TURQUOISE
I know the man
who was the form
of turquoise lifted
Into air…i know
The man who dreamed
He was turquoise,
Laid in matrix,
Waiting, following
The artist, finding
The form, chiseling
The night, loving him…
I know the man who was held and
Who felt the peeling
Away. I know the man
Who lay in the mountain
Until the artist was born
Who would chip and fit,
Who would hold, who
Would set the form
Into sandcast silver.
I know the man
Who believed in the man
Who would love the form,
Who would direct the
Forming, who would
Contain the form, who
Would long for the flow.
I know the man
Who knows turquoise
From inside-out,
In a wholeness, who
Becomes the shape moving
Through the matrix
No different
From a cradle.
I know the man
Who found his years
Piled up under earth
Shift and change
Around him, who laid
With his eyes shut
Waiting patiently
For the mines to be
opened. I know the man
who knows the artist
and changes his color
at will, touched and found
between blue and brown.
I know the man
whose fingers bleed
tearing up through
earth; i know the man
who built his strength
bringing turquoise
to the sky. He told me
stones are like this:
bones wrapped in heat
and hardness, rasping
the seasons around
in a gourd and
holding the planet
in place.
MY RED ANTENNAE RECEIVING: VERMONT
The first they said to me on the day i arrived was “we have no Indians here.”
Mountain to mountain (none of them so thin
As those i know in the west) sound is cupped
In the earth to erupt another time
When memory begins to edge away.
The voices have no end.
They are not stilled.
Songs steam, dipping into snow
As they look for familiar trails.
For tracks left my ancient tongues,
Forgotten women and the places
They propped
Their burden baskets.
CORN-GRINDING SONG TO SEND ME HOME: NEW HAMPSHIRE
Comparing kinds of desert:
Birch and snow bump on my eyes
Like drumbeats, shake me down
Into my shoes like joshua trees
And dunes never did.
The mountains of the east
Are softened and calmed by snow
Not angry or chastised
Like the temper of the Sierras.
…
I am trying this new song with open mouth
Yet it catches against my teeth
For something here is different….
My hands are still Hopi
And will keep me home
Moving back and forth
Palms down, fingers curled
On cool stone, dreaming
The metate and maize within.
MARGARET NEUMANN (poet’s great-great-grandmother)
The dangerous dreams of a wild girl,
They said, who goes to meet her husband
Beneath the twisting serpent and Gael
Of Mexico’s flag…
Gold the river
That pulled you west
The tall grass, the orange poppies
Rising from rock and swamp
Red the Missouri mud
That transformed you
At the border and this now
Is mine as you try
To imagine me.
…
Are you the astonished one
Or am I? That we meet like this
Between the sailing ship
And the silver jet
Crossing the sky?
More than a century later
My brown hands cannot recall
Your Germany or your Mother Lode
Yosemite untouched by tourists.
My questions burn
And summon fire
Older than the sun.
If you are a part of me
I am also the crazy acorn
Within your throat
Around which pioneer stories
Rattle and squirm.
If you are the brave heritage
Of Gold Rush California,
I am also the bone that buzzes
Behind your breast.
If i am the tongue made indigenous
By all the men you would love,
I am also the ghost
Of the pioneer’s future.
Native storms wail.
Death rides the frontier.
I am the other voice
Blasted from the mountain…
Touching the silver
At the center of us both
I believe you would understand.
Do you remember
The sacred signs
Painted in the startling blue,
Spirit that mumbled
In the German Black Forest?
Do you remember the tribes
That so loved their land
Before the roll
Of Roman wheels?
No archeology
To my bones
My cells will
Not forget
How to live
How to be born
How to be still singing
When they feel
The new knowledge
Death is
Like dying
Each moment
Learning to live
Wendy Rose is of Hopi, Miwok and European descent, and is an artist, writer, and anthropologist and was nominated for a Pulitzer for her 1980 book Lost Copper. She writes that since her mother wasn’t Hopi, only her father, she was raised without a lot of culture, and she has had to grapple with that disconnect. Her poetry is spare, sublime, heart wrenching and covers all the wars, internal, external, international, in families. She should be required reading, and it is unfathomable she is not.
FOR MY PEOPLE
I was myself blow
Two leafs apart
Seeing the ground swim within
Sliding and slipping together
And apart
Growing closer
Biting at our shadows
Loving on our feet
Dying in our souls
Losing one another
Losing ourselves
Finding
THE LONG ROOT
The feeling of sand in my eye
Has somehow shortened my breath
Allowed the night to descend
In its slow and twisting stream.
Voices disguise themselves,
Plane smooth from me splinters
As I speak my bones on the mesa
So that part of me still believes
I will not be left here to die.
Before the intensity of summer
Is that devastating storm
And no matter how i try
There is no way to shake
Cambodia from my Wounded Knee.
LAB GENESIS
There will be
No archeology
To my bones
My cells will
Not forget
How to live
How to be born
How to be still singing
When they feel
The new knowledge
Death is
Like dying
Each moment
Learning to live
Each moment
In & out
Like bird breath
Like toad’s tongue
Like making love
When i die
I ask only
To be thrown
Into the sun
TO SOME FEW HOPI ANCESTORS
No longer the drifting
And falling of wind,
Your songs have changes;
They have become
Thin willow whispers
That take us by the ankle
And tangle us up
With red mesa stone,
That keep us turned
to the round sky.
You have engraved yourself
With holy signs, encased yourself
In pumice, hammered on my bones
Till you couldn’t longer hear
The howl of the missions.
THE MAN WHO DREAMED HE WAS TURQUOISE
I know the man
who was the form
of turquoise lifted
Into air…i know
The man who dreamed
He was turquoise,
Laid in matrix,
Waiting, following
The artist, finding
The form, chiseling
The night, loving him…
I know the man who was held and
Who felt the peeling
Away. I know the man
Who lay in the mountain
Until the artist was born
Who would chip and fit,
Who would hold, who
Would set the form
Into sandcast silver.
I know the man
Who believed in the man
Who would love the form,
Who would direct the
Forming, who would
Contain the form, who
Would long for the flow.
I know the man
Who knows turquoise
From inside-out,
In a wholeness, who
Becomes the shape moving
Through the matrix
No different
From a cradle.
I know the man
Who found his years
Piled up under earth
Shift and change
Around him, who laid
With his eyes shut
Waiting patiently
For the mines to be
opened. I know the man
who knows the artist
and changes his color
at will, touched and found
between blue and brown.
I know the man
whose fingers bleed
tearing up through
earth; i know the man
who built his strength
bringing turquoise
to the sky. He told me
stones are like this:
bones wrapped in heat
and hardness, rasping
the seasons around
in a gourd and
holding the planet
in place.
MY RED ANTENNAE RECEIVING: VERMONT
The first they said to me on the day i arrived was “we have no Indians here.”
Mountain to mountain (none of them so thin
As those i know in the west) sound is cupped
In the earth to erupt another time
When memory begins to edge away.
The voices have no end.
They are not stilled.
Songs steam, dipping into snow
As they look for familiar trails.
For tracks left my ancient tongues,
Forgotten women and the places
They propped
Their burden baskets.
CORN-GRINDING SONG TO SEND ME HOME: NEW HAMPSHIRE
Comparing kinds of desert:
Birch and snow bump on my eyes
Like drumbeats, shake me down
Into my shoes like joshua trees
And dunes never did.
The mountains of the east
Are softened and calmed by snow
Not angry or chastised
Like the temper of the Sierras.
…
I am trying this new song with open mouth
Yet it catches against my teeth
For something here is different….
My hands are still Hopi
And will keep me home
Moving back and forth
Palms down, fingers curled
On cool stone, dreaming
The metate and maize within.
MARGARET NEUMANN (poet’s great-great-grandmother)
The dangerous dreams of a wild girl,
They said, who goes to meet her husband
Beneath the twisting serpent and Gael
Of Mexico’s flag…
Gold the river
That pulled you west
The tall grass, the orange poppies
Rising from rock and swamp
Red the Missouri mud
That transformed you
At the border and this now
Is mine as you try
To imagine me.
…
Are you the astonished one
Or am I? That we meet like this
Between the sailing ship
And the silver jet
Crossing the sky?
More than a century later
My brown hands cannot recall
Your Germany or your Mother Lode
Yosemite untouched by tourists.
My questions burn
And summon fire
Older than the sun.
If you are a part of me
I am also the crazy acorn
Within your throat
Around which pioneer stories
Rattle and squirm.
If you are the brave heritage
Of Gold Rush California,
I am also the bone that buzzes
Behind your breast.
If i am the tongue made indigenous
By all the men you would love,
I am also the ghost
Of the pioneer’s future.
Native storms wail.
Death rides the frontier.
I am the other voice
Blasted from the mountain…
Touching the silver
At the center of us both
I believe you would understand.
Do you remember
The sacred signs
Painted in the startling blue,
Spirit that mumbled
In the German Black Forest?
Do you remember the tribes
That so loved their land
Before the roll
Of Roman wheels?
September 4, 2019
Lots to like here. Rose provides a sense of the difficulty of avoiding bitterness over the position of Native Americans in the last decades of the 20th century. Using a semi-documentary style in several poems, many concerning the obscene treatment of Native remains and objects, Rose testifies to what Gerald Vizenor calls Native "survivance." The voice is vernacular, not as lyrically searching as the poetry I respond to most deeply. If that's closer to your aesthetic, give it an extra star.
Recommended poems: "Long Division: A Tribal History"; "For the White Poets Who Would Be Indian"; "Another One of Those Dreams Where I Grind My Own Colors"; "My Red Antennae Receiving: Vermont"; "Corn-Grinding Songs to Send Me Home: New Hampshire"; "Do You See Her Alone on the Mountain"; and "Coyote."
Recommended poems: "Long Division: A Tribal History"; "For the White Poets Who Would Be Indian"; "Another One of Those Dreams Where I Grind My Own Colors"; "My Red Antennae Receiving: Vermont"; "Corn-Grinding Songs to Send Me Home: New Hampshire"; "Do You See Her Alone on the Mountain"; and "Coyote."
April 29, 2022
I quite enjoyed this. Bone Dance is my introduction to Wendy Rose's work. I think this is a solid "greatest hits"––these types of collections can be difficult, because you lose the poems in context of their full manuscript. I did, however, think the pieces here fit well together. I love Roses's use of desert imagery and I thought the poems that alluded to her background in archaeology were great.
I'm excited to check out a couple of her full length collections!
I'm excited to check out a couple of her full length collections!
November 14, 2021
Rose is an extremely important and talented poet, but greatest hits albums have never really been for me.
May 28, 2024
favorites: "Loo-Wit" / "Reminder" / "Margaret Neumann"
November 20, 2025
this book was my first introduction to Wendy Rose's work and to say I am a fan would be an understatement. really beautiful work that I would recommend to all.
July 26, 2016
Bone Dance is a collection of poems from other anthologies, written from 1965-1993 by Wendy Rose. Wendy Rose identifies as Hopi/Miwok, yet much of her writing deals with her struggles to find her identity as an American Indian because during her childhood she was raised in a white, urban community and was unable to have access to her Hopi/Miwok family connections. Her mother was mixed raced, including Miwok, but refused to identify with this ancestry and at times discouraged Rose from identifying as well. When Rose began attempting to connect with her father’s Hopi side of the family, she discovered that she would not gain Hopi tribal membership because kinship and identity is determined matrilineally in Hopi society, excluding her from becoming a recognized Hopi tribal member. In order to further explore her identity, Rose later joined AIM and went with the group to occupy Alcatraz, a time during which she became more familiar with her own identity.
Many of the poems in Bone Dance deal with the objectification of indigenous bodies, often including a white concern for profit over the value of human lives and their bodies. One example is “I Expected my Skin and my Blood to Ripen” which includes a description of an art catalog from 1977—the catalog proudly discusses that Indians killed in the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre were stripped of their clothes and dumped into open graves naked so that their personal belongings could be kept as pieces of “art” by the white individuals that looted the bodies. These items were then put in the catalog in 1977 for sale. Rose discusses the “rape” that has occurred in this situation, describing how the bodies were treated and then “shriveled” in the winter elements (19). The poem “Truganinny” is even more horrific, and is inspired by the account of the last Tasmanian, Truganinny [also seen as Truganini], who had to watch as her husband was stuffed, mounted, and put on display. She begged for this not to happen to her when she died, but of course, she was also stuffed, mounted, and put on display [her body was cremated and scattered in April 1976]. Rose writes that Triganinny had pleaded, “Put me where / they will not / find me” (55).
The poem “Plutonium Vespers” has a wonderful example of historical trauma and how it can manifest itself within poetry:
Other themes include place, ceremony, language, gender, identity, urban Indian experiences, racism, and nature.
Many of the poems in Bone Dance deal with the objectification of indigenous bodies, often including a white concern for profit over the value of human lives and their bodies. One example is “I Expected my Skin and my Blood to Ripen” which includes a description of an art catalog from 1977—the catalog proudly discusses that Indians killed in the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre were stripped of their clothes and dumped into open graves naked so that their personal belongings could be kept as pieces of “art” by the white individuals that looted the bodies. These items were then put in the catalog in 1977 for sale. Rose discusses the “rape” that has occurred in this situation, describing how the bodies were treated and then “shriveled” in the winter elements (19). The poem “Truganinny” is even more horrific, and is inspired by the account of the last Tasmanian, Truganinny [also seen as Truganini], who had to watch as her husband was stuffed, mounted, and put on display. She begged for this not to happen to her when she died, but of course, she was also stuffed, mounted, and put on display [her body was cremated and scattered in April 1976]. Rose writes that Triganinny had pleaded, “Put me where / they will not / find me” (55).
The poem “Plutonium Vespers” has a wonderful example of historical trauma and how it can manifest itself within poetry:
take this offering
of flesh, this color
and this color, take
all the memories,
take the pain,
take it and shake it
everywhere shake it
all of us shaking
I am shaking (104)
Other themes include place, ceremony, language, gender, identity, urban Indian experiences, racism, and nature.
Read
April 23, 2011For a while, I was not in my own life.
September 27, 2015
Poetry to shake your bones. Very good.
March 26, 2017
This is an excellent collection. Rose uses a muscular, contemporary vocabulary in ways both elegant and abrupt, a contrast that is accentuated by her mastery of free verse rhythm. However, no emotion is lost in this exercise in form: the collection emphatically and empathetically communicates tragedy, horror, and rage, as well as humor. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys contemporary poetry, or just poetry in general.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews